No Tomorrow – by Catherine Deery
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On the day Josephine our sow escapes her pen and trots off across the flat paddocks in search of love, Timmy from town is at ours and me and him are trying to hurdle the creek on our BMXs using empty drench drums and sleepers stolen from Mum’s garden as a ramp. When Mum gets the call from old Mr Taylor on the farm next door about that goddamn pig rooting around in his house garden again, she puts her hand over the receiver and sticks her head out the back door and clocks the sleepers and drums and me and Timmy and the BMXs in one sharp eyeful but doesn’t say anything, just beckons me over and makes the shape JOSEPHINE with her mouth then TAYLOR’S, so I know it’s bad, and I race down the sheds on my bike with Timmy in pursuit, and I find Dad welding rusted bits of metal together for a fence or a yard or a cage to keep some things in and other things out, and I tell him about Josephine.
That fucking slut, Dad says, and he grunts as he gets up off the hard concrete where he’s been on one knee, and Timmy makes a squawking laugh, and I know Timmy’s heard a lot worse at home because I’ve been to his house after school before Mum sat on my bed and said Timmy was always welcome at ours but I wasn’t to go to his place anymore, but this is what Timmy does — always laughs in the wrong places at the wrong things and sometimes the more he’s picked on at school the more he laughs and sometimes it’s hard being friends with a person like that. Dad strides to the HiLux with the crate still on the back from last time, and says hop in lads, and he takes the potholed bend near the house at a clip and Timmy pushes me into the door and I feel all the skinny bits of his body and I don’t know whether his trembles are from fear or excitement or both. We round the kurrajong with sticky pods and there’s Mum, rushing out the gate and banging on the side panel of the ute as it goes past. She’s on heat, love. She’s on heat, you hear me. But dad makes out he doesn’t hear or he doesn’t care, he’s staring grim-faced down the track and we leave Mum in a cloud of dust and I look over my shoulder and see her mouth all twisted up, because she loves Josephine and she raised her from when she was a small pink hairless thing the size of a gumboot, and she loves my dad too but she knows what he’s like when things slip outside his control, and so far this week Josephine has three times slipped through, eluded, and shucked off the fences and posts and pens and wires put in place to keep her separated from her desires, and Dad’s reached the end of his tether from the mad dark look in his eye.
Dad floors the HiLux and we shoot up the asphalt and we’re at Taylor’s driveway in a flash, and as we pull in Timmy points and says There! And it’s Josephine ambling towards us along the gravel track like she’s strolling home from a neighbourly visit. I open the gate gentle and slow like Dad instructs me, and close it behind the ute, and Dad says ok boys nice and easy keep her walking along the fenceline and he drops Timmy and me behind Josephine. Timmy’s traipsing beside me in the too-big blundstones Mum makes him wear after he turned up too many times barefoot, and Dad’s out wide in the ute so Josephine can’t break away into the paddock, and when Josephine reaches the corner she stands quietly and looks back at us over her shoulder and seems entirely unperturbed. Dad stops the ute and the three of us walk in with our arms wide making soft calm noises and Dad says under his breath ok, on the count of three, but right when Dad draws breath for three Josephine pushes her head and shoulders smartly through the boundary fence and with a sharp kick of her hooves she canters away up the bitumen. Dad lies with his forehead on the dirt, and then gets to his knees and shakes his head and even Timmy knows not to laugh.
Get in! Dad says and we jump back in the ute to resume the chase. Now Timmy has the shakes big time I feel him all aquiver beside me as the ute accelerates down the road after Josephine, who has zigzagged off the asphalt onto the roadside and is sprinting along the fenceline. Dad draws the ute alongside and brakes sharply in the gravel edge and we tumble out and charge down the embankment to try to grab her. This time there’s not much by way of plan or design with each of us straining to catch the pig any way we can and Josephine weaving and ducking and eluding our grasps. Dad is swearing on one side of me and on the other Timmy is panting and slipping behind in his borrowed boots, and soon it’s just me and Josephine going stride for stride and I reckon I’m gaining on her. From far behind I hear dive son, dive! And so I do — I dive with fingers outstretched, and for one brief moment I make contact with Josephine’s hind leg. Josephine skids to a halt and I sail past her and land a full body length in front. I look at her and she looks at me, and then she snorts and turns and gallops in the opposite direction, back to where Dad stands hands on hips, and behind him, Timmy bent over holding his side — Timmy left far behind in the chase.
And I don’t know this yet, but today is one of the last times Timmy will come out to ours and muck around at the creek, or chase pigs, or do any of the dumb stuff we have been doing for the past two years. I don’t know yet that in a few short months I will be tired of Timmy and his skinniness and his nervous laughter and the way his eyes spill over with some dark fear, and the way he freezes when the teacher asks him a question in class, so that he looks stupider than he really is and so that the other kids roll their eyes and smirk about where he comes from and where he belongs. I don’t know yet that one day soon Timmy will ride his BMX out from town, along the six kilometre stretch of road in the middle of summer, and he will come to the front door and Mum will call my name, but I will be hiding at the sheds, because he hasn’t got it into his thick head that we’re not friends anymore. From the sheds I will watch Timmy ride back down our driveway in the boiling heat, and later Mum will find me and her face will be blood red and she will hold her hand to her throat and she will say I have never been so ashamed of you, ever, and, yes, I will be ashamed, but I will also feel a tight, small gladness that I have been as mean and hard as I need to be.
But right now none of that has happened and I’m sitting in the dirt watching Josephine neatly sidestep Dad and I’m resigned to the fact that we’ll never catch this pig, not ever, and I’m waiting for Dad to storm to the ute and roar back to the sheds and take the shotgun out of the locked cabinet, and for Mum to look out the kitchen window and know it all, know that Josephine doesn’t stand a chance. But then, as I’m watching Josephine prance away and thinking all is lost, I see Timmy, out of nowhere, Timmy in his borrowed boots like buckets, Timmy loping forward with some kind of lopsided grace to leap sideways and land on Josephine, and fix himself like a leech even though she slides about under his arms, and I hear him say C’mon Girl and Whoa Now and then, as if Timmy has magic in his hands, Josephine grows calm and slow and she lowers her haunches and plants herself on the ground. And Timmy, holding firm, raises his chin and looks across the salted earth at me, and grins like there’s no tomorrow. ▼
Image: Andrew Wallace
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